Tag Archives: Amelie Nothomb

My 2024 in review without lists

Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of the listacle – those articles that list the best of or worst of or top 10 etc. They’re click bait and often poor examples of writing. By copping out of the type of commentary or critical review that threads an argument,  they offer mere snapshots brimming with clichés. With this hanging over my head for what I shouldn’t do, I’m reviewing 2024 under a few categories.

My year as a verbivore

Yes, I used to refer to myself as a logophile, but I’ve decided to use verbivore instead despite Word underlining it in red. This word was coined by the writer Michael Chabon in 2007 when talking about his love of words.

I’m afraid 2024 hasn’t been good year for verbivores thanks largely to the many national elections taking place all over the world and where politicians have overused words, such as woke, to the point that it can mean the opposite of their original meaning – or simply have no meaning at all aside from being something to despise. I’m also somewhat miffed that words like demure and mindful have gained new meanings thanks to the verbal grasping of social media influencers. Both words are being used to mean low-key and subtle in fashion and style.

The OED ranked brain rot as the word of the year, one that I never used even once. Apparently, it has come out of the Instagram/TikTok generation’s feeling after scrolling through dozens of posts. It can also refer to the low-quality content found on the internet that I do my best to avoid – a challenge when trying to find vegetarian recipes on Pinterest and having to skirt around videos of cats stuck in jars.

While I don’t go around recording myself, I’ll bet that my most used word during this year was incredible. In part, I’ve picked this up from the French who frequently use incroyable. When the worst president in US history (according to historians) gets re-elected after doing and saying so many things that individually should have made him unelectable, that’s incredible. On a more positive note, given my first-hand experience dealing with builders, plumbers and electricians in the South of France, I  thought it incredible that Notre Dame Cathedral was renovated after the catastrophic fire in just over five years.

My year as a reader

This year has been dominated by two writers as in recent weeks I found myself reading yet  another Robert Harris novel, my third this year, and another Amelie Nothomb foray into autofiction, my second for 2024.

After hearing Harris speak about his latest book, Precipice, in Ely a couple of months ago, I delved into this thriller which begins at the onset of WWI. It’s an historical period I’m strangely fond of and the story recounts the true-life affair between Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and the socialite Venetia Stanley. Asquith’s casualness towards national security is mind-boggling  as his teenage-boy infatuation led him to share with Venetia everything from Cabinet debates to classified documents coming from his wartime generals. Though not as complex or informative as Harris’s Pompeii or as intriguing as his Conclave, Precipice is still an entertaining and interesting book.

Taking advantage of the public library in Menton, I’ve just finished Amelie Nothomb’s La Nostalgie Heureuse (avail in English). The narrator’s view on the world is as quirky as ever and expressed with her usual dry wit. In this story, she’s already a well-known writer living in Paris, who returns to Japan to participate in a documentary about her early life. Key to this is an anxiety-provoking reunion with a man she nearly married some twenty years earlier. A noteworthy aside – she (fictional narrator and real-life author) had written about the relationship in one of her earlier books and when the ex-fiancé is asked by the documentary maker how he felt about that book, he said that he enjoyed it as a ‘work of fiction.’ This is when the narrator realises that her truth could be other people’s fiction – a wink to the reader of this autofiction.

Throughout the year, I have also made it a point to read writers that are highly praised in the literary press that I have never read. Earlier in the year it was Paul Auster and Antonio Scurati and in recent weeks Carson McCullers. I finally read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which most people know from the 1968 film. Set in a small town in Georgia during the Great Depression, the story recounts the lives of several characters who are connected by their work and family circumstances. Their sense of isolation is explored against a backdrop of poverty and racism, with a nuanced struggle with homosexuality. The weaving of the stories reminded me of a typical Robert Altman film – very enjoyable despite the grim subject matter.

On the non-fiction side, this year I’ve continued my nerdy interests in bees and trees, trying to find texts for non-specialists that aren’t too scientifically dry or too jokingly flippant. While I’ve also read some excellent biographies and memoirs, the most thought-provoking and impassioned nonfiction  I’ve experienced this year has been in the opinion pages of the New York Times, The Observer (UK) and Le Monde. They serve as reminders that despite populist voting trends, humanity still exists.

My year as a writer

I started out this year with two writing goals. One was to return to novel #4 and give it a thorough rewrite. While I didn’t produce a full rewrite, I have rewritten about half of it and have made notes for the other half. This task was interrupted by an avalanche of editing assignments that came my way in October and lasted until December. The other writing goal was to simply send out either one short story or one essay every month. I did manage to send out 12 stories/essays this year, but without the monthly regularity – there were a couple of inactive months and a couple bubbling with creativity. Five rejections have been taken on the chin (three were competitions after all) and I await 7 replies.

In the second half of the year, my writing took on a more therapeutic purpose – maybe my way of dealing with complex PTSD. For the first time I’m writing about unpleasant childhood memories and with the creative process taking over, I’m fictionalising certain characters and subplots. I’ve been experimenting with the ‘I-narrator’ by taking on the role of persons other than myself, trying to revisit these episodes from others’ points of view. I seemed to have tapped into something as the work I’ve shown readers so far has been extremely well-received in ways unusual for my early drafts.

My year as a human

Being a linguist, reader and writer are all a part of being a human, but I am aware too that there are other identities of my humanity, such as a friend, spouse, sibling, neighbour, citizen etc. For me, all these roles fill one stratum of physical living in all its sociocultural and psychological dimensions. In this stratum, 2024 has been about witnessing climate change, and then climate change denial by some and inaction by others, along with the public discourse of hate that substantial portions of the population engage with, making me feel like an outlier. I know I’m not alone in this, but I no longer inhabit a space in the norm range.

Another stratum of my humanity exists, but I grapple to explain even to myself. The word spiritual has been stretched and abused by religious and anti-religious alike to the point that I avoid using it. Perhaps this stratum covers all things incorporeal, including abstract thought. This year has made me more aware of this disembodied beingness, if awareness is all I have for now. And so, I continue to practice mindfulness (in the pre-2024 sense of the word – nothing to do with fashionable clothes).

Thank you, readers, for your comments and emoji reactions over the year. I wish you all peace and joy for 2025.

Gisele Pelicot, my choice for Person of the Year

Il Duce and the Donald

It’s easy to see how much these two men are alike, down to their speeches made through puckered lips and puffed-up chests. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say how much these two are different. After recently reading Antonio Scuratti’s M: Man of the Century, I look at Mussolini in a different way and as less of a cardboard cutout. This first history-come-novel  of a trilogy depicts Mussolini’s early political life from the time of post First World War Italy until he gained power in 1924.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini was not born gagging on a silver spoon. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher. Mussolini trained to be a teacher but worked for a living as the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper for the fasci movement. Mussolini also served in his country’s armed forces during WWI and was wounded. Not so with the former US president, who avoided the draft with student deferments and finally, when those ran out, a medical exemption. Tr*mp’s CV consists of basically one thing – businessperson, a position obtained with properties inherited from his father.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini knew politics and the ways of government. He was active in the Socialist Party before defecting with others to create their own movement over the issue of pacifism during WWI. Mussolini supported workers’ rights while supporting the industrialists, who were trying to reshape and capitalise off the country left bloodied and poor after the war, with little help from their allies America, France and Britain. Tr*mp’s political career was a spin-off from his media personality and self-publicity as a ‘successful’ businessperson.

While both men, once they achieved political power, encouraged and denounced violence in the same breath, Mussolini’s hands were dripping in blood. Metaphorically, of course, since he sent out others to do his dirty work. He specifically ordered the killing of his enemies, including the leader of the socialist party. Some would argue that the orange one is responsible for the deaths on 6 January 2021 at the Capitol, the deaths of anti-racists activists during his term in office and even the deaths of thousands of Americas due to his reckless response as president to the Covid pandemic. But all these examples are about responsibility through verbal coercion and propagandizing.

When it comes to public speaking, while the two men may have presented themselves in similar fashions and to my bewilderment been able to stir up a crowd, the prose of their speeches are starkly different. A skilled writer, Mussolini could craft his language and make logical arguments. And unlike Tr*mp, he never attacked his opponents with schoolchild slurs and name calling, which I’m not going to reprint here as I have reached my saturation point. Mussolini’s discourse would typically pick apart his rivals’ arguments and then tip the rhetorical balance by making threats of  violence: “The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.”

While both men attacked democracy, it’s worth considering the nuanced differences. Mussolini called democracy a ‘fallacy’ because people do not know what they want and because  ‘democracy is talking itself to death.’ Tr*mp said that if he lost the 2020 election, it proved that democracy was an ‘illusion’ because ‘the system is rigged’ and ‘everyone knows it.’

One final noteworthy difference, Mussolini’s fascism, unlike the MAGA campaign, spawned an art movement. Il Novecento rejected the avant garde of the early 20th century in favour of more traditional large landscapes and cityscapes, reflecting the fascists’ ideology. From Scuratti’s book, I’ve learned that this movement was founded in part by one of Mussolini’s many mistresses. Whatever the motivations and manipulations of Il Novecento, Tr*mp and his MAGA movement are in a word artless.

Painting by Mario Sironi of Il Novecento

Pointing out the differences between these two leaders not only highlights the unfitness of the former US president for any position of governmental leadership, but it makes me think that fascism is an overused term that like so many political and ideological words, changes its meaning over time. Yet, the essence of it remains as noted in a recent interview with writer Naomi Klein. On the topic of fascism, she said ‘I’m scared whenever we get whipped up in a mob and don’t think for ourselves. That’s how the updated far-right is drawing people in. It’s extremely dangerous.’

What else I’ve been reading

This has turned out to be a summer of big fat reads, with the Antonio Scuratti book weighing it at 750+ small print pages. To counter this, two excellent novellas have capped off the summer. I’ve finally gotten around to reading something by the Belgium writer Amélie Nothomb. Stupeur et Tremblement (avail. in English) is a drole, at times laugh-aloud funny, story of a young Belgium woman’s experience working for a Japanese company. The expected East meets West clashes are there, but so too is a humorous take on workplace bullying (I know, it can be serious and soul-destroying).

The other lightweight but not intellectually so was Thomas Mann’s classic Death in Venice. I first read it decades ago at university. Having since seen the film with Dirk Bogarde, I could only envisage his twinkling brown eyes  as those of Aschenbach. The older me also appreciated the references to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (who wasn’t on my radar until 5 years ago), adding more meaning to the book’s meditation on aestheticism.